The Battle of Verneuil 1424

Today is the sixth centenary of the battle of Verneuil in 1424. It is not one of the battles of the Hundred Years War that has survived in the popular memory like Crécy, Poitiers or Agincourt, but to contemporaries the English victory over the French and Scottish armies and their allied Milanese mercenaries was seen as a second Agincourt. 

Not only did it more or less eliminate the Scottish army but, fought as it was on the southern border of Normandy, which was thereby consolidated, it also opened up the real possibility for the English of advancing south into Maine and reaching the Loire. Not until 1429 were the Dauphinist forces able to retaliate and halt the advance at the siege of Orleans. 

It was apparently a very bloody victory with numerous French and Scottish commanders and men killed or captured, rather as at Agincourt. 

The Duke of Bedford with his heraldic badge of "wood stocks" (tree-stumps) and his motto A Vous Entier A miniature from the Bedford Hours

Image: Wikipedia 

The victory built upon the Anglo-Burgundian victory at Cravant just over a year previously and in many ways avenged the English defeat and the death of the Duke of Clarence at the battle of Baugé in 1421. 

The English, led by the Regent, John Duke of Bedford, won a victory that was not only significant in terms of the campaign to complete King Henry V’s ambition of resolving the Anglo-French conflict by conquering France. It was also the last time an English army on the continent defeated the French in a pitched land battle until Blenheim in 1704. Whatever else those 280 years brought to England, and later to Britain, they did not bring military glory on a comparable scale. No wonder Blenheim Palace is so spectacular as a celebration of Marlborough’s Anglo-Austrian triumph, and of so emphatic an English defeat of the French after so long a time.

For the English, for the French Dauphinists and for the Scots Verneuil left legacies that shaped their internal politics and diplomacy in the following years..

Wikipedia has a quite detailed account of the battle and its significance at Battle of Verneuil and also a short account of the town itself at Verneuil-sur-Avre